INTRODUCTION:
Can your website be used by ALL visitors? Are you preventing partially-sighted
surfers from using your services by having a website which 'breaks' in
a speaking browser? Not only are you failing to gain business from a sizeable
section of the community, but you may also be considered to be discriminating
against visitors with disabilities.UK LEGISLATION:
The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) makes it unlawful
for a provider of services to discriminate against a disabled person by
refusing or deliberately failing to make its services available to disabled
people. In Section 21 of this Act, a duty is placed on those providing
services to the public to make reasonable adjustments so that disabled
people can access the services - whether the service is paid-for or free.
Websites, whether selling products and services or providing information
can be considered as being covered by the DDA and recent media coverage
has already focussed on site-owners whose pages 'fall foul' of accessibility
guidelines being targeted for action by the Authorities.

THE PROBLEM:
Many websites may be perfectly legible and well-designed when viewed 'normally',
but are difficult or in some cases actually impossible to surf using a
'non-standard' browser. Some surfers with disabilities may use a speaking
browser, which reads the text content of a site, or may need to view using
high contrast on-screen colours or large size text. Websites which have
been designed without these considerations in mind (possibly the vast
majority of pre-legislation layouts) will fall foul of the new guidelines.
Those sites relying heavily on Flash content, animated navigation, or
even with an inconsitent hyperlink layout or lack of image descriptions
would also 'break the rules'.

In an ideal situation, existing sites would need to be totally overhauled
or redesigned, taking these accessibility issues into account. At least,
a complete text-only version of the site would need to be created so that
visitors would be able to 'opt out' of the regular graphics intensive
version. In many cases, either of these options may prove to be impractical
- either from a financial or logistical viewpoint.

A FAST COST-EFFECTIVE SOLUTION:
Using software developed by BBC Education in conjunction with the
RNIB, which runs on a server independent of your own website, we
can provide a fast, cost-effective way to display a complete text-only
version of your site (in fact up to three websites) just by placing a
single hyperlink on any page!

No
need to even create any text-only version pages

No need to update any text-only content

Provide
visitors with the ability to match the page display to their own needs